Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [66]
Stephanie Leonidas plays Helena, an adolescent girl who no longer enjoys life with her parents’ perpetually struggling circus, to put it mildly, even though it’s her father’s labor of love. (He’s played by the likable comic actor Rob Brydon.) A talented artist, she escapes into the world of her imagination at every opportunity. Then, when her mother (the wonderful Gina McKee) takes ill after a heated argument, Helena actually steps into the alternate universe she has created. Here, against a wildly fanciful and bizarre backdrop, she finds herself in the unexpected (and uncomfortable) position of potential savior. The world has been cast into a state of darkness and only she can find the means to awaken the slumbering Queen of Light (who, naturally, is also played by McKee). In her travels to the Dark World, our heroine discovers that she has a doppelganger—a “bad” Helena—who personifies all of her worst thoughts and fears.
Stripped down to its barest essentials, this is the story of a quest—a metaphoric one, to be sure—not unlike the journey undertaken by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Helena meets many strange and extraordinary creatures along the way, notably a juggler named Valentine (Jason Barry) who becomes her friend and adviser.
Despite its complications the story is fairly simple; what complicates it, and threatens to weigh it down, is the sheer volume of visual invention paraded before us. There’s scarcely a “normal” moment once we leave the drab world of the family circus, and it can be overpowering at times. Roger Ebert described the characters as “very strange creatures, some of them with shoes for heads, others weirder than that, who seem by Hieronymus Bosch out of an acid trip.”
What keeps the story anchored, it seems to me, is the fact that we identify with Helena and empathize with her guilt over having argued with her mother just before she’s rushed to the hospital. Leonidas’s likable performance, and McKee’s natural warmth, make their characters relatable and remind us that everything else we see is a mirror distortion of the crises both mother and daughter are experiencing.
Dave McKean has won awards and acclaim for his illustrations. For his feature-filmmaking debut he gathered a group of young, eager artists to work with him to design and execute a daunting number of computer graphic images. The results are quite astonishing, all the more so when you learn that they were done by a handful of people working on a minuscule budget.
Even if Mirrormask isn’t destined to become part of our collective consciousness like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, I think it’s an ideal film for families to share together, if the kids are old enough to digest such a dark story. It may well fire their own imaginations.
91. MOONLIGHTING
(1982)
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
Screenplay by Jerzy Skolimowski
Actors:
JEREMY IRONS
EUGENE LIPINSKI
JIRÍ STANSILAV
EUGENIUSZ HACZKIEWICZ
Say Moonlighting and most people immediately think of the popular TV series of the 1980s with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis. I wish more people would say, “Oh, you mean that incredible movie with Jeremy Irons?” But thanks to DVD, there is always the chance for people to discover this little-known gem.
Moonlighting is the work of Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, who has never achieved the notoriety of his friend Roman Polanski (for whom he wrote the latter’s breakthrough feature, Knife in the Water), but he has maintained a presence on the international film scene for decades, earning prizes at top film festivals and achieving international recognition for such films as Le Départ, Deep End, The Shout, Torrents of Spring, and The Lightship.
But to my mind, Moonlighting is a masterpiece